I’ve spent years studying how organizations manage resources. Mostly, I see waste.
Companies throw away equipment that still works. They scrap programs that could be repurposed. They dump knowledge when people leave.
Then I read about a construction crew in Hull, England, who found a cast iron cannon while digging a hole for a water tank. The cannon weighed over 2,200 pounds. It dated back more than 300 years.
But here’s what caught my attention: someone had capped the nozzle and turned this weapon into a mooring post.
Not symbolic. Not ceremonial. Pure economics.
The Economics of Repurposing
According to Dr. Martin Evans, an expert on historical cannon use, the scrap value of these iron cannons was low enough that “it was economical for civil authorities or businesses to buy them when strong bollards were needed.”
Think about that decision tree.
You need a mooring post. You could commission a purpose-made post from a commercial foundry. Or you could buy a decommissioned cannon, cap the nozzle, and plant it in the dock.
The cannon was cheaper.
This wasn’t about nostalgia or preserving history. Maritime communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries looked at obsolete military equipment and saw functional infrastructure.
They asked a better question than we do today: What else could this be?
What Gets Thrown in Convenient Holes
Peter Connelly, the archaeology manager who analyzed the find, put it this way: “This discovery just goes to show that people will deposit anything in a conveniently large hole in the ground when it is being backfilled.”
The excavation site revealed more than just the cannon.
Workers found a complete late 19th century glass decanter in the same backfill. Connelly noted that “somebody was probably quite upset when they lost this.”
Backfill sites become time capsules. They preserve layers of history from multiple periods because people throughout time have done the same thing: tossed unwanted items into convenient holes.
This pattern reveals something about human behavior.
We don’t think about what happens to things after we’re done with them. We find a hole. We fill it. We move on.
The cannon sat in that dock backfill for nearly a century before construction workers accidentally rediscovered it. During that time, the site transformed from one of the largest docks in the United Kingdom into Queen’s Gardens, a public park.
The dock operated for 150 years before closing in 1930. Hull Corporation purchased it for £100,000 and spent four years filling it in and landscaping it.
Economic transitions leave archaeological signatures.
Rarity in Expected Places
What surprised me most about this discovery:
Hull has extensive maritime and military manufacturing history. The city had its own cannon makers in the late 18th century. You would expect cannon discoveries to be routine.
They’re not.
This marks only the third cannon discovery in Hull in 30 years.
The previous two were a Henry VIII-era cannon found in the late 1990s and a fragment from just before the English Civil War. That’s three significant finds in three decades in a city built on maritime commerce and naval defense.
Rarity exists even in historically rich environments.
I see the same pattern in organizations. Companies assume their knowledge is preserved somewhere. Someone must have documented that process. Someone must remember why we made that decision.
Then they go looking and find nothing.
The knowledge was there. It just wasn’t captured. It got thrown in a hole when someone left or when priorities shifted.
The Worker Who Thought He Hit a Bomb
Jon Jacobs, the construction worker whose equipment struck the cannon, initially thought he’d hit a World War II bomb.
His reaction reveals expectations.
“I’ve never dug up anything like this,” he said. He’s used to finding “small bottles, bits and bobs like that, just junk, but not really anything as significant as this.”
Most excavation work reveals nothing remarkable. You dig. You find broken glass, old bottles, fragments of pottery. You keep digging.
Then you hit something that shouldn’t be there.
Organizations experience this during restructuring or system migrations. Teams dig through old files, legacy databases, forgotten servers. Most of what they find is junk.
But occasionally they uncover something valuable that everyone assumed was lost or never existed.
The problem is that by the time you find it, you’re usually in the middle of filling in a new hole.
What Urban Archaeology Reveals About Organizational Memory
Archaeological fills are “an important part of the archaeological record as their formation and composition can throw light on many aspects of study.”
Translation: The stuff people throw away tells you as much about them as the stuff they keep.
Urban construction sites that cut through centuries of history reveal “hidden neighborhoods, forgotten industries, and lost cultural practices.” Cities carry their histories within them.
So do organizations.
Your company has layers of decision-making buried in old email threads, deprecated systems, and the memories of people who left years ago. Those layers contain information about what worked, what failed, and why certain approaches were abandoned.
But you only discover them by accident, usually when you’re trying to do something else entirely.
The Question Nobody Asked
Researchers are now analyzing whether the Hull cannon was manufactured locally or imported. They’re examining the casting marks, the iron composition, the design specifications.
Even for artifacts from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, historical records remain incomplete.
Local manufacturing capabilities may have existed but left limited written documentation. The cannon might have been made in Hull by Hull cannon makers for Hull’s defense or commerce.
Or it might have come from somewhere else entirely.
The physical evidence survived. The paperwork didn’t.
I see this constantly in organizations that have been around for decades. The product still exists. The system still runs. But nobody remembers who built it, why they made certain design choices, or what problems they were originally trying to solve.
The knowledge was never captured because it seemed obvious.
What We Can Learn From a Capped Cannon
The people who converted this cannon into a mooring post weren’t archaeologists or historians. They were practical people solving an immediate problem with available resources.
They saw a decommissioned weapon and asked: What else could this be?
That question led to a solution that worked for decades until the dock itself became obsolete and was filled in. The cannon served its second purpose, then was discarded when that purpose ended.
Three hundred years later, we’re still learning from that decision.
Most organizations today don’t ask that question. When equipment becomes obsolete or a program ends, the default response is disposal. Scrap it. Delete it. Move on.
But obsolete doesn’t mean useless.
The challenge is creating systems that capture not just what we’re using now, but what we stopped using and why. What did we repurpose? What did we throw away? What problems did we solve with unexpected resources?
Those answers sit in holes, waiting for someone to dig them up.
The Holes We’re Filling Right Now
Your organization is filling holes right now.
You’re migrating to new systems and abandoning old ones. You’re restructuring teams and losing knowledge. You’re upgrading technology and discarding what came before.
Some of what you’re burying deserves to be buried.
But some of it might be a 2,200 pound cannon that could serve a completely different purpose if someone just asked the right question.
The problem is that you won’t know which is which until someone accidentally digs it up a hundred years from now.
Maybe the better approach is to ask before you fill the hole: What else could this be?
That’s the question that turned a weapon into infrastructure and created an archaeological discovery three centuries later.
Ask it before you hit delete.